If MtGox can ident the Bitcoins, why not fix it?

[Vigil]

duties of the US government:  establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity

Making money 'trackable' is good business and makes sense and would probably come under the first three of the above.  If it didn't make sense Las Vegas would have left their casino chips untraceable but no, they realize the RFID identification and tracking of casino chips makes good sense for them and offers a level of protection they need.

Those are general clauses listed in the preamble - they give no power. You should be looking at Article I, Section 8. The Federal government has only the enumerated powers expressed here and like a few others. The Federal government is also not granted a monopoly on currency, nor the power to forbid others from making currency, or using other currencies, or to require that private currencies are made according to certain rules. In fact, it only has the power to coin money from gold and silver (which never was traceable) - what you call the "dollar" is a counterfeit irredeemable paper ticket (i.e., a bill of credit). It is illegal for the federal government to issue bills of credit. What we call the "dollar" is illegal. So, you may be right that it could be a good idea, but the federal government just doesn't have the authority to do it - unless it could somehow put serial numbers on gold and silver coins, which would be very difficult, but not necessarily uncoinstitutional.

Hard to believe I am talking to someone on Bitcointalk who does not understand this already.

[nanonano]

Not sure what the demo dat rule is.  Perhaps that there is a uniqueness to the stolen property?  I see that dollars have serial numbers and now so do casino chips.  So if the demo dat rule doesn't apply to seralized numbered dollars it doesn't apply to casino chips even tho now they have rfid tags internally (saw it on CSI used as evidence) so maybe the demo dat rule does apply to serialized numbered dollars.  It likely applies to serialized numbered dollars having been marked with an explosive dye pack from a bank robbery.

Whether coins have numbers or rfid is not relevant in any way: this is exactly what I was trying to show by modifying the mugger-example... With most things property ownership is the most important value so your expectation holds: you get the exact stolen item back even if it means that later trades that were made with best intentions have to be canceled. The crucial exception is money and several things like it: When money is stolen, your property rights are _not_ the most important thing, security of transactions is the most important thing. This means if the mugger used your money to buy things at the store, you cannot get that money from the store: you need to get the mugger to give you the same amount of money instead.

It's possible that bitcoin will be considered a commodity in some court (I wouldn't bet on it), but I really doubt that applies in your situation. MtGox had the bitcoins, not you.

[JoelKatz]

On Friday, 2 BTC were stolen from me. I am considering reporting this to law enforcement. This means that anyone who receives BTC which derives from my stolen 2 BTC will be liable to return them back to me.

This doesn't make sense and I don't think any court will hold this. Imagine if they did this for dollars and the guy who holds "your" bills just withdrew them from an ATM. The bank would not have delivered "title" to the money, and so the bank would be liable to the guy who withdrew. This would make modern banking essentially impossible. See, for example, SEC v. Better Life Club of America. I don't see recission theories working either, since they don't apply against innocent third parties either, just counterparties.

[MrTeal]

Can every satoshi of those missing Bitcoins be traced?  I'd bet that would be a yes. 

Why do you believe that to be so? A bitcoin isn't a thing, and it doesn't have a unique identifier. The general use over time of Bitcoin it it's own mixing service; by the time any court orders are issued to seize the Bitcoins withdrawn from Gox they most likely won't just be sitting around in some wallet. They'll be distributed in small fractions in a huge number of wallets of a correspondingly large number of people.

Again, even if you came up with enough consensus to get the Bitcoin protocol changed to allow the invalidation of coins and reissuing those sums to people who say they had them stolen, how do you decide what coins to take? Do you just based on a percentage of taint? What do you do when you successfully get your X Bitcoins taken back from people who had previously withdrawn them from Gox, and then they in turn have to sue you in Bitcoin Court because after all, most of them were probably just people who'd deposited in Gox and now are out their coins, same as you were.

Besides the technical challenges, who do you propose runs this court that you want to get everyone to agree on? The US Government? The Japanese? The Bitcoin Foundation? Some kind of consensus voting through the blockchain? The biggest draw of Bitcoin is that there isn't a central despot who can unilaterally choose monetary policy.

[soy]

duties of the US government:  establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity

Making money 'trackable' is good business and makes sense and would probably come under the first three of the above.  If it didn't make sense Las Vegas would have left their casino chips untraceable but no, they realize the RFID identification and tracking of casino chips makes good sense for them and offers a level of protection they need.

Those are general clauses listed in the preamble - they give no power. You should be looking at Article I, Section 8. The Federal government has only the enumerated powers expressed here and like a few others. The Federal government is also not granted a monopoly on currency, nor the power to forbid others from making currency, or using other currencies, or to require that private currencies are made according to certain rules. In fact, it only has the power to coin money from gold and silver (which never was traceable) - what you call the "dollar" is a counterfeit irredeemable paper ticket (i.e., a bill of credit). It is illegal for the federal government to issue bills of credit. What we call the "dollar" is illegal. So, you may be right that it could be a good idea, but the federal government just doesn't have the authority to do it - unless it could somehow put serial numbers on gold and silver coins, which would be very difficult, but not necessarily uncoinstitutional.

Hard to believe I am talking to someone on Bitcointalk who does not understand this already.

You are addressing the right of Bitcoin to exist.  I do not dispute the right of Bitcoin to exist.  I do not accept that the Bitcoin economy has a "right" to promote or facilitate criminal activity be it theft of Bitcoins from MtGox or movement of profits from of illegal drug sales out of the country or as that muckraking US official said at the Senate hearings, to be used to buy and sell children.

[Vigil]

duties of the US government:  establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity

Making money 'trackable' is good business and makes sense and would probably come under the first three of the above.  If it didn't make sense Las Vegas would have left their casino chips untraceable but no, they realize the RFID identification and tracking of casino chips makes good sense for them and offers a level of protection they need.

Those are general clauses listed in the preamble - they give no power. You should be looking at Article I, Section 8. The Federal government has only the enumerated powers expressed here and like a few others. The Federal government is also not granted a monopoly on currency, nor the power to forbid others from making currency, or using other currencies, or to require that private currencies are made according to certain rules. In fact, it only has the power to coin money from gold and silver (which never was traceable) - what you call the "dollar" is a counterfeit irredeemable paper ticket (i.e., a bill of credit). It is illegal for the federal government to issue bills of credit. What we call the "dollar" is illegal. So, you may be right that it could be a good idea, but the federal government just doesn't have the authority to do it - unless it could somehow put serial numbers on gold and silver coins, which would be very difficult, but not necessarily uncoinstitutional.

Hard to believe I am talking to someone on Bitcointalk who does not understand this already.

You are addressing the right of Bitcoin to exist.  I do not dispute the right of Bitcoin to exist.  I do not accept that the Bitcoin economy has a "right" to promote or facilitate criminal activity be it theft of Bitcoins from MtGox or movement of profits from of illegal drug sales out of the country or as that muckraking US official said at the Senate hearings, to be used to buy and sell children.

Who is saying any of this?

[soy]

Can every satoshi of those missing Bitcoins be traced?  I'd bet that would be a yes.  

Why do you believe that to be so? A bitcoin isn't a thing, and it doesn't have a unique identifier. The general use over time of Bitcoin it it's own mixing service; by the time any court orders are issued to seize the Bitcoins withdrawn from Gox they most likely won't just be sitting around in some wallet. They'll be distributed in small fractions in a huge number of wallets of a correspondingly large number of people.

Again, even if you came up with enough consensus to get the Bitcoin protocol changed to allow the invalidation of coins and reissuing those sums to people who say they had them stolen, how do you decide what coins to take? Do you just based on a percentage of taint? What do you do when you successfully get your X Bitcoins taken back from people who had previously withdrawn them from Gox, and then they in turn have to sue you in Bitcoin Court because after all, most of them were probably just people who'd deposited in Gox and now are out their coins, same as you were.

Besides the technical challenges, who do you propose runs this court that you want to get everyone to agree on? The US Government? The Japanese? The Bitcoin Foundation? Some kind of consensus voting through the blockchain? The biggest draw of Bitcoin is that there isn't a central despot who can unilaterally choose monetary policy.

The 744,408 Bitcoins left via many one-of-a-doubled transaction so one or both of those illegal transactions point to an address that was controlled by computer, whether private or public, that left an identifying trail with regard to the date and time location and perhaps right down to the MAC address of the corresponding machine(s) and even if effected using TOR it would be a question of tracking that would be technically possible - caveat that's my opinion.

Paragraph 2 - good ideas.

Paragraph 3 -yes, the idea was suggested by the Japanese this morning.  Their suggestion should be given more than typical weight given that perhaps the MtGox location in Japan and Bitcoin itself posed as a creation of a Japanese whether true or not both of which lent to MtGox a higher potential trust by depositors.  I point to the quality of US automobiles versus Japanese automobiles as helping to form opinion.  If MtGox was posed as developed and financed by a Wall Street broker or brokerage house the public trust of it would be quite different.

[AnonyMint]

You should realize that this means all BTC you own and all the gains you accrue can be clawed back from you in the future.

Theft of BTC is very widespread even without the exchanges and with the Mt.Gox fiasco (and more to come because the government + banks can bankrupt all the exchanges with regulations, fines, placing holds on funds, etc, or even send in secret agencies to steal the keys).

For those readers trying to rationalize away the contract between accounts holders and Mt.Gox, you have no legal standing. Bitcoin is not legal tender. So many governments have spoken on this already and declared it to be a commodity. Clearly we are looking at a big legal mess with Bitcoin which the government is going to have to solve holistically. Now you see I was correct from the very beginning in Bitcoin : The Digital Kill Switch.

All you Bitcoin millionaires are going to be Bitcoin jailbirds and destitute.

For those who are rationalizing away the chain of ownership (I explained upthread) due to that the lack of physical nature to Bitcoin, you don't have any chance of winning that argument. If it wasn't owned, it wouldn't have value that can be exchanged. Even if we are trading fungible tokens in a pool, the tokens are still owned. Cripes, are you guys totally ingenuous or ignorant.

[Amitabh S]

You should realize that this means all BTC you own and all the gains you accrue can be clawed back from you in the future.

Theft of BTC is very widespread even without the exchanges and with the Mt.Gox fiasco (and more to come because the government + banks can bankrupt all the exchanges, or even send in secret agencies to steal the keys).

For those readers trying to rationalize away the contract between accounts holders and Mt.Gox, you have no legal standing. Bitcoin is not legal tender. So many governments have spoken on this already and declared it to be a commodity. Clearly we are looking at a big legal mess with Bitcoin which the government is going to have to solve holistically. Now you see I was correct from the very beginning in Bitcoin : The Digital Kill Switch.

All you Bitcoin millionaires are going to be Bitcoin jailbirds and destitute.

For those who are rationalizing away the chain of ownership (I explained upthread) due to that the lack of physical nature to Bitcoin, you don't have any chance of winning that argument. If it wasn't owned, it wouldn't have value that can be exchanged. Even if we are trading fungible tokens in a pool, the tokens are still owned. Cripes, are you guys totally ingenuous or ignorant.

Oh, bold and red font.. Must be legit.

[AnonyMint]

Oh, bold and red font.. Must be legit.

Continue to ignore it please. I will be watching all Bitards fall into the abyss together when the mess comes to the point that you can't find any one to buy your coins, yet you are liable for all the clawback amount.

Mansions will be confiscated. Paddy rides to debtors prison will be ensue when you can't pay.

[soy]

If the implication that South American drug lords move money to their accounts using Bitcoin is true, then they must have experienced Bitcoin theft and perhaps have somewhat successful recovery methods, some kind of Jose Ray Donovan IT Corp.    Maybe MtGox should look for them before they come looking for MtGox.  Second largest heist in recorded history will get some kind of action.

[soy]

Too bad MtGox didn't insure its accounts against theft with Lloyds of London.

[leopard2]

Oh, bold and red font.. Must be legit.

Continue to ignore it please. I will be watching all Bitards fall into the abyss together when the mess comes to the point that you can't find any one to buy your coins, yet you are liable for all the clawback amount.

Mansions will be confiscated. Paddy rides to debtors prison will be ensue when you can't pay.

Mental institutions should not provide internet access to their inmates.

[smoothie]

Oh, bold and red font.. Must be legit.

Continue to ignore it please. I will be watching all Bitards fall into the abyss together when the mess comes to the point that you can't find any one to buy your coins, yet you are liable for all the clawback amount.

Mansions will be confiscated. Paddy rides to debtors prison will be ensue when you can't pay.

Wow this is a pretty broad assumption. You expect all governments everywhere to declare any Bitcoin holder as a criminal? Lol

Good luck coordinating that world wide.

[soy]

Wonder what will be happening at the Nassau County Coliseum when he's in town to answer the subpoena right across the street there.

[AnonyMint]

Oh, bold and red font.. Must be legit.

Continue to ignore it please. I will be watching all Bitards fall into the abyss together when the mess comes to the point that you can't find any one to buy your coins, yet you are liable for all the clawback amount.

Mansions will be confiscated. Paddy rides to debtors prison will be ensue when you can't pay.

Wow this is a pretty broad assumption. You expect all governments everywhere to declare any Bitcoin holder as a criminal? Lol

Good luck coordinating that world wide.

Rebuttals were already posted:

For your 'theory' to actually play out Anonymint you would have to have all law enforcement agencies around the world able to access anyone in the world - just about guaranteed to never happen. Know who the owners of the public addresses in question were (many of which would never be associated with an exchange or any other business that would have real user details in any way) - impossible. And, have to be able to have some way of tracking chains of millions and millions and millions of transactions, and deal with tumblers etc. In conspiracy land maybe, in reality not going to happen.

You have a very low IQ.

They can access anyone along the chain of ownership, cherry picking someone in their jurisdication and who didn't use strong anonymity methods.

Orthogonal to that slam dunk, you are discounting the degree of tracking and cooperation that the G20 is doing and planning to do, in response the $150 trillion debt implosion coming and the need to confiscate all wealth to resolve this debt.

You are correct that Bitcoin millionaires have more to fear than Bitcoin paupers. Economy-of-scale favors going after the larger of the culpable.

Orthogonal point is the NSA+bankers have no incentive to prosecute when they can solve the problem by putting it on the merchant's back. And its their legal tender system they want to keep in power.

Whereas, crypto-currency can't be charged back and it threatens their power. So they will apply more effort.

[AnonyMint]

Cant believe this stupid thread is still alive !

MtGox has an internal record? really?? and how am I to believe such a record has not been tampered with or generated two days back? ?

Rebuttal was already posted:

The Feds recently subpoened Mt.Gox to force them to retain trading records, so the chain of ownership will be known to law enforcement.

[soy]

I'm not sure about how that double-payout, the transaction malleability error, was made to work.  I recall a slow response on MtGox when making a 3btc withdrawal around the second week of November 2013.  The transfer didn't seem to go thru and I hit the button a second time and ended up sending 6 btc but the 6 btc was deducted from my balance, not 3btc.  So, that wasn't the fault.  Sloppy true but there was no wrongful gain or loss.  

Okay, I can see how this could be a problem if I was sending those 3btc to someone else.  I was unsure of the exact amount of a purchase and sent the 3 btc to another account where I could sign a message if necessary.

If I had been sending the 3 btc to someone else I would have ended up sending them 6 btc instead but of course 6 btc would be deducted from my account.  I don't see how 7744408 btc could be mis-sent this way.

Edit: My mistake, 744,408 Bitcoins.

[MrTeal]

Rebuttal was already posted:

The Feds recently subpoened Mt.Gox to force them to retain trading records, so the chain of ownership will be known to law enforcement.

You think it's a given that MtGox has detailed, accurate and long term trading records? From a company that managed to lose all but 2000BTC out of 750,000BTC (if the story is true) before they noticed and pulled the plug?

[Squeaker]

Rebuttal was already posted:

The Feds recently subpoened Mt.Gox to force them to retain trading records, so the chain of ownership will be known to law enforcement.

You think it's a given that MtGox has detailed, accurate and long term trading records? From a company that managed to lose all but 2000BTC out of 750,000BTC (if the story is true) before they noticed and pulled the plug?

simply defies logic and reason... there is no way they couldn't have known the situation that was brewing underneath them, except for willful blindness and apathy to the problem.

Just inconceivable they didn't notice it.

There was another thread posted, where someone put forth the possibility that while there was a malleability issue, that Gox was trying to use it as a scapegoat to cover for the possibility, that they found they couldn't access their frozen wallet and that their keys weren't working.

I find this much more plausible than some ring of anonymous unverified accounts massively double-withdrawing in the volumes they would have to do to cover that amount of coins in a limited time, without drawing attention to themselves.

It would certainly explain how desperate they sounded a couple weeks ago when they were demanding the bitcoin devs fix the malleability issue asap... they seemed absolutely frantic.

(and if this was the case, soy, you can rest assured, your bitcoin monies are safe and sound at the frozen wallet address, and nobody is going to be able to get to them... not even the people at Gox.)

=squeak=